Karl Giberson’s recent blog post for Huffington Post connects the evangelical church’s anti-evolution belief with a growing disconnect of young persons.  He argues that the more evangelical churches reject science, the more it will lose teenage-to-twenty-something members.  

 

Dr. Giberson notes that some churches encourage young people to challenge their science teachers by asking “Were you there” whenever they are taught that earth is not 6,000 years old, or that human beings evolved over billions of years.  “The suggestion that scientists cannot speak about the past unless ‘they were there’ is a strange claim,” he writes.  “The implication is that we cannot do something as simple as count tree rings and confidently declare ‘This great pine was standing here 2,000 years ago.’ As a philosophy of science, such a restriction would completely rule out the scientific study of the past. This, of course, is precisely what the creationists want.”

 

I understand why some Christians think challenging scientists is a holy pursuit.  If scientists suggest the Bible is not to be taken literally–even those sections that were written to be figurative explanations of the relationship between God and mankind, such as Genesis 1-3–then evangelicals believe they must do whatever they can to defend their faith from such naysayers.  I understand this, but I don’t agree with it.

 

Christianity is about living like Jesus, and Jesus was not interested in science.  He chastised the righteous and the greedy, and encouraged the desperate and poor in spirit.  He drove out money changers and loved prostitutes.  He said the Kingdom of Heaven is for persons who visit widows and prisoners.  

 

That’s what matters, not defending a poor interpretation of the Creation narrative as a scientific treatise. 

 

Evangelicals, go ahead and believe the earth is 6,000 years old.  Go ahead and argue that “Were you there?” is a powerful defense against reason.  Go ahead and be intellectually impotent and critically irrelevant.  But when you do this, don’t do it in the name of Christ.  Do it in the name of your own deliberate ignorance.